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Wednesday, May 01, 2013

ARE YOU SLEEPING AWAY YOUR LIFE?


On the average, most of us will spend TWENTY FOUR YEARS of our lives SLEEPING!

Whoa! I found that a hard pill to swallow so I did the math. If you are one of the believers in the magical powers of sleeping 8 hours a day (which represents 1/3 of your allotted 24 hours), in a week you’ll be sleeping 56 hours, in a month you’ll be looking at 224 hours and in a year, you’d be clocking in 2920 hours of sleep. Multiply it by the at least 70 years you’re hoping to live and you got yourself 204400 hours. Do the necessary long division and you have yourself 23. 39 years (and you didn’t add the extra hours you snuck in as a baby and all the extra snoozing time when you’re at retirement age). Wow. If you were earning a minimum wage of £6.19 (or the US minimum of $7.25) for every hour you’d have slept, you’d have earned £18,074.80 ($21,170.00) a year and £1,265,236 ($1,481,900.00) in 70!
Name
Job
Hours of Sleep
Note
Marissa Mayer
Yahoo CEO
4-6
Worked as many as 130 hours some weeks while at Google, recharging by taking week long vacations every four months


Jack Dorsey
Twitter founder and Square CEO
4-6

Donald Trump
Chairman of The Trump Organization
3-4
Quoted in The Daily News:”How does somebody that’s sleeping 12 and 14 hours a day compete with someone that’s sleeping three or four?”
Kelly Ripa
Host of “Live! with Kelly and Michael”
Usually sleeps between midnight and 1 a.m. and wakes up at 6:15 a.m.
Ripa also has three kids and a production company she owns with her husband Mark Consuelos.
Bill Clinton
Former U.S. President
4 -6 hours a night throughout his presidency.
A professor at Georgetown told him great men require less sleep.
Tom Ford
Fashion designer and director
3 hours
He does not attribute this success to talent, but says it’s due to his energy.
Indra Nooyi
Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo
4 hours

Martha Stewart
Chair of Martha Stewart Omnimedia
4 hours
Her company produces four magazines, Martha Stewart Living, Everyday Food, Weddings, and Whole   Living. She additionally has a TV show, radio show and product lines in stores

You snooze you lose 
Donald Trump is credited with saying: "I sleep very little, 3 or 4 hours a night. And that’s what I need. And I have friends that need 12 hours sleep. I say, 12 hours? What are you going to do? So how does somebody that’s sleeping 12 and 14 hours a day compete with somebody that’s sleeping 3 or 4? It doesn’t work that way".

Tell me about it. I realized that each moment I spent sleeping unnecessarily someone else was out there getting ahead, becoming better and gaining the advantage. Here’s something from the New Living Translation of the Bible: A little extra sleep, a little more slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest and poverty will pounce on you like a bandit; scarcity will attack you like an armed robber. (Proverbs 23:33-34)

Time is money and I became obsessed with shaking every penny from every second and used to go all crazy and try to strangle sleep. Once, I went from Thursday morning to Saturday afternoon without proper sleep, shuttling from work in the morning, straight to class around 5pm, to the house to shower by 6am and off to work again. 48 hour stints were common. For a long time, I never even really shut down…just hibernated, with my laptop next to me. People became worried and I got lots of lectures about how I was hurting myself and how it was not necessary to push so hard. Just to be sure I wasn’t digging an early grave, I did some quick research.

Less is More 

How many hours of sleep can I live on? I did a quick check to see if there’s any documentation for how many hours of sleep successful people get, and to my pleasant surprise, I found a couple of sites. Here’s the info on a few of the people I found:

Evan Williams, the founded Blogger (he sold it to Google for millions and then went ahead to start Twitter) has a reputation of regularly working 12-14 hour days; Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg is also known for working long hours and occasionally sleeping at his desk. Decades earlier, Microsoft’s Bill Gates was known for his incredible work ethic too.

How many hours of sleep do you get?

Wake Up! I have cut down on the madness now. Instead I have developed an understanding with my body. No more fighting sleep with Redbull binges and swallowing caffeine tablets like a druggie. Now I listen to my body. Still push it, but when it can take no more, I give in to her (yes, I have decided she’s female so I can treat her right…I am a gentleman). I have learnt the power of ‘power naps’ (20 minute stints) to drive up energy at the lowest points of the day. I like getting up early and depending on the intensity of work, get up between 1 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. and try as much as possible to get between 3-5 hours every day.

Like Aristotle said: Don’t sleep too much. If you sleep 3 hours less each night for a year, you will have an extra month and a half to succeed in. Key thing though isn’t just staying awake. It is what you do with that time. However, though we all have 24 hours in a day to succeed in, but taking Aristotle’s advice I get more time than most of you and even if we were doing the same things - I am at an advantage.

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